Chris Shyrock is helping Atlantic.Net strengthen customer support in one of the most demanding environments in technology: cloud infrastructure and data centers. As Director of Support Services, Chris leads the team responsible for supporting customers who rely on Atlantic.Net for cloud services, colocation, dedicated hosting, managed services, and infrastructure they cannot afford to have fail.

In this episode, Russ and Chris explore how Atlantic.Net transformed its support organization while also completing a major data center migration with no customer impacts attributed to the move. Chris explains how the company improved queue ownership, daily governance, shift handoffs, escalation paths, and customer communication while maintaining 24/7/365 service for clients in high-stakes industries like healthcare.

They also discuss what it takes to turn technically strong support staff into customer-ready communicators. Chris shares how he reviewed calls and emails, re-onboarded the team, trained people to own the call, and encouraged support professionals to de-escalate concerns, explain issues clearly, and meet customers at their level.

Along the way, Chris discusses Trustpilot reviews, customer feedback, team empowerment, regulated customer environments, AI cloud infrastructure, NVIDIA GPU hosting, continuous improvement, and why support is often the trust layer between a technology provider and the customers who depend on it.

Topics Covered:

[00:01] Welcome and intro, Chris Shyrock, Atlantic.Net, and the Excellence in Customer Service Award win

[00:45] Atlantic.Net’s long history in cloud and infrastructure services

[01:23] What Atlantic.Net provides for cloud, colocation, dedicated services, and managed infrastructure

[02:58] Why Atlantic.Net focused on customer service transformation

[04:00] Teaching technical support teams to communicate with customers more clearly

[05:21] Aligning staffing, mindset, and shift coverage

[06:30] Queue ownership and daily governance in support operations

[07:26] Managing customer change, technology change, and internal change at the same time

[08:45] Training the team to own the call and de-escalate urgent customer issues

[09:25] Why practice matters in customer support training

[11:00] Getting support teams comfortable with doing the harder thing for customers

[12:10] Why leaders need to be reachable during high-stakes incidents

[13:40] Transforming the support team during a major data center migration

[14:46] How the support organization contributed to a no-impact migration

[16:10] How major operational events can elevate a team

[16:44] The hardest habit to change in a long-running support organization

[17:44] Using Trustpilot reviews as evidence of support quality

[19:34] Why moving review scores is hard and meaningful

[20:00] Turning customer problems into trust-building opportunities

[22:36] Upskilling support teams for new infrastructure and AI workloads

[23:32] Advice for technical support leaders with inconsistent customer experience

[27:22] Final thoughts on Atlantic.Net’s transformation and continuous improvement